Thanks everybody for comments and interest :)

When it comes to security and spammers I think that you can approach to it like to any PM feature available on any message board. I think it's natural for any community to be able to communicate with each other. After all RIPE Atlas is a community of networking geeks/nerds/engineers who like to measure the Internet and share resources with others. Sometimes we just need to exchange some info to get help and mailing lists is not always the best way to do it. I don't think it's a serious security threat but I also find comments from Martin Boissonneault quite helpful to build something as much secure as possible without excessive complexity.

When it comes to location of probes, Steve Gibbard probably described the real problem more precisely than me. The goal is to get reliable data about probes location and this is for sure important for all RIPE Atlas users. One way is to poke people manually and it's OK if you have to do it once per few months but it would be better to get more automated detection mechanism for that. Steve uses IP geolocation which has its limitations (I know probes with IPs from country X but they are properly deployed and described in country Y on different continent). I personally visualize distance from probe to target and compare it with RTT and hops but it's still not fully automated and still can be tricky and requires additional checks.

So open question is: How to reliably verify location of probes OR How to motivate RIPE Atlas users to provide valid locations and keep it up-to-date?

Regards,

Grzegorz

From: Robert Kisteleki <robert@ripe.net>
Organization: RIPE NCC
Date: Wednesday 2019-04-24 at 10:43
To: "ripe-atlas@ripe.net" <ripe-atlas@ripe.net>
Subject: Re: [atlas] Communication with probes' owners

On 2019-04-23 13:10, Ponikierski, Grzegorz wrote:

I thought about simple web form available only for logged users of RIPE

Atlas. In this way all private data are hidden and RIPE can rate limit

usage of the form. Message itself can be send to probe's owner via email

from RIPE Atlas infra so sender identity also can be hidden. If somebody

wants to switch to email communication then form can also be used to

exchange email addresses.

Regards,

Grzegorz

Hi,

I agree that allowing RIPE Atlas users to send messages to probe hosts

would be a useful feature. I also think that requiring someone to log in

first before sending a message to the probe hosts is a sufficiently high

bar against systematic abuse (to begin with -- we can be stricter later

if needed).

I can imagine the form also having a feature to let the original sender

expose her email to the recipient to facilitate further communication.

Regards,

Robert